The present invention relates to location estimation with a reduced number of frame exchanges between electronic devices in a wireless network system, and more particularly, to a method for estimating a location of an electronic device, and to an associated apparatus.
According to the related art, a conventional electronic device in a wireless network system can be designed to determine the location of the conventional electronic device in a situation where the locations of reference points (for example, APs) in the wireless network system and the time of flight (or the time of electromagnetic wave propagation) between the conventional electronic device and each of the reference points are known. However, some problems may occur. For example, before the conventional measurement operations in the conventional timing measurement procedure are performed, it is typically needed to scan and find out the wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (APs) that support WLAN positioning in advance, and therefore, the conventional electronic device should frequently scan for surrounding APs that are usable, causing the power consumption of the conventional electronic device to be greatly increased. In another example, for each of the WLAN APs that support WLAN positioning, three frame exchange sequences are typically required, where one of the three frame exchange sequences may need a frame sent from the conventional electronic device to the WLAN AP under consideration and the corresponding acknowledgement frame sent from this WLAN AP to the conventional electronic device, and each of the other two of the three frame exchange sequences may need a frame sent from this WLAN AP to the conventional electronic device and the corresponding acknowledgement frame sent from the conventional electronic device to this WLAN AP. More particularly, as the number of frame exchanges for the timing measurement is typically proportional to the number of peer devices under consideration and the frequency of updates, the total channel capacity of the wireless network system may be insufficient in some situations (e.g. the frequency of updates increases, and/or the number of users who need positioning in the wireless network system are many). As a result, service delay or poor quality of the positioning service may occur since there are too many frame exchanges in the wireless network system. Thus, a novel method is required for improving the location estimation of an electronic device in a wireless network system.